Tag Archives: infolit

Non-English blog roundup #3

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Via betabib (Swedish), RSS4Lib has a list of library web pages that list experimental, beta, or trial web tools and services.

Thomas on Vagabondages (French) discusses CollegeDegree’s “25 social networking tools”; I was particularly interested by Daft Doggy, of which Thomas says “If I’ve understood correctly, Daft Doggy is an application which lets you record a session in a web-browswer and then… replay the [web-surfing] visit, modify it, and add commentary.”
Thomas also quotes Fred Cavassa who says, “Have you noticed that the term ‘web 2.0’ is no longer fashionable? […] Now we speak of social media.“

Dominique, bibl. prof. (French) links to her presentation from the ASTED/CBPQ colloquium about profession wikis in libraries: the example of the University of Quebec network (powerpoint).

Via Deakialli, Desde los Zancos 2.0 interviews Dídac Margaix Arnal (Spanish). To a question about promoting collaborative library 2.0 technologies faced with hesitant managers, Dídac suggests talking about:

  1. personal experience – how web 2.0 tools have helped you professionally;
  2. experiences of other libraries;
  3. the fact that the tools are free; and especially
  4. “we have to assume that Web 2.0 is the form in which digital natives communicate, relate to each other, inform themselves, compare information, etc. If we want to converse with them, we’ll have to use these tools […]”

Bibliobsession 2.0 (French) talks about the idea of using Cover Flow for catalogue displays. There are tools for creating coverflow displays: “for the English-speaking library geeks, this post on The Corkboard presents other technical possibilities to do the same thing, and there also exists Protoflow to do the same thing.”

Marlène’s Corner (French) reports the launch of Hypothèses.org, “a blog platform destined to lodge journal blogs […] As for the journals, the blogs will be subjected to a selection process […]” The posts aren’t intended to replace articles, but to accompany and facilitate the publishing process.

Non-English blog roundup #2

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Deakialli DokuMental (Spanish) writes about navigation and filtering with tags – also discusses facets. “What is the problem? That description and navigation are different concepts.” This post made me think about searching using social bookmarking sites. I use Diigo which only has an AND search – as far as I can tell (and I hunted a bit) there’s no way to do even an NOT or OR search. Del.icio.us has a few advanced search options, but still no truncation search. As far as I know, there’s no reason this couldn’t be done, and it would make a search for “blog OR blogs OR blogging” much easier.

Documentalistes (Catalan) briefly evaluates Google Image Ripper, a site where you can type in your image search and it brings up the full-size images instead of the thumbnails. I note that it doesn’t solve the duplication problem: it would be Really Cool if a search for “madame de lafayette” didn’t include both images #1 and #5 which are identical. (Literally: Answers.com took it straight off Wikimedia. Some kind of pixel-by-pixel matching algorithm? Yes, yes, strain on the server and would slow down the results. Still.)

DosPuntoCero (Spanish) talks about some surveys described in the book “Libraries and the Mega-Internet Sites” (ISBN: 1-57440-096-7) The blog has pretty bar graphs for

  • librarians’ attitude to Wikipedia (untrustworthy, use with care, as good as print encyclopaedias)
  • whether libraries have a YouTube account (yes, no, planned for the next year)
  • whether libraries have published photos on Flickr (yes, no)

The bars are blue for public libraries, red for university libraries, green for special libraries. My executive summary: public libraries are more liberal towards all these things than university libraries; special libraries are between the two on Wikipedia and Flickr but way down there on YouTube.

Biblog (Danish) links to Intute, “a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners.” (quote from Intute’s page) I definitely need to explore this more. My colleague reminded me that Intute also created The Internet Detective which teaches students how to work out whether internet pages are trustworthy or not.

And just for fun, betabib (Swedish) links to an (English) interview with a helpdesk operative on the Death Star. If I weren’t hungry for my lunch I’d work out how to be web2.0pian and embed it here, but my cheese and pineapple sandwiches are calling to me.

How to give a successful workshop: lessons learnt from a dream

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I don’t dream about work every night. Just the nights I actually get enough sleep to hit the appropriate REM cycle. But when I do, why not share the lessons learnt? I take no responsibility for workshops based on this advice…

  1. Know how many people will be taking the workshop.
  2. Limit the number to something you can handle.
  3. Make sure there are enough workstations for everyone to work at.
  4. If people continually arriving will disrupt the workshop, close the door soon after starting.
  5. If people continually leaving will disrupt the workshop, chain participants to their desks soon after starting.
  6. Prepare a realistic lesson plan with built-in leeway.
  7. Check all equipment, internet connections, URLs, logins, etc, beforehand.
  8. Have a list of all necessary URLs, logins, etc. In multiple handy places.
  9. If workshop participants need URLs, logins, etc, email them in advance. And have handouts ready as well.

If all else fails — as it clearly had in my dream — be prepared to be flexible:

  1. If you originally planned to run an interactive workshop and find that due to hundreds of people turning up this is impractical, just deliver a lecture instead.
  2. If you originally planned to cover two topics and are halfway through your time having barely started on the first, just shrug off the second one.
  3. If you originally planned to show examples but can’t remember your log-in / can’t find the URL / can’t get the wireless connection working, just move on to something else.
  4. If despite utter confusion and chaos you’ve managed to muddle through to the end and attendees inexplicably begin applauding, accept their thanks gracefully. It isn’t often one has an anxiety dream without the anxiety.

Online flowchart generator

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Last year a new course started here, compulsory for all 700-odd intermediate-year engineers at the university. On the plus side, the course coordinator was wonderful about getting the library involved in their first assignment; on the minus side… well, 700 intermediate-year engineers all desperately needing to know how to cite websites and videos in APA.

So this year I’m creating an ambitious display all about citing. It’s going to have whats, whys and hows; a three-step process; links to more online information; possibly a puzzle with prizes (must ransack the drawer of vendors’ highlighters to see if we’ve got anything fun); and a tip of the day with “ingredients”, a flowchart, and “here’s some we prepared earlier” examples.

So I needed to make flowcharts. I wasn’t going to draw them by hand or mess about with Word shapes. I remembered playing with an online flowchart generator which was awkward but workable – I just couldn’t remember the name or find it again. This was lucky, because instead I found Gliffy

Gliffy’s free demo lets you have five free flowcharts – that means five at any one time, as you can create a chart, save it as a jpg (or png or svg), ‘revise’ it into a completely new chart, rinse and repeat as many times as you like (or at least as many times as I’ve needed – 14 so far).

It’s all click-and-drag, very user friendly. Far more options than I need or understand, but easy to find the options I do need. Colours, fonts, sizes and styles are customisable. Arrows attach to boxes so things can be dragged about and stay attached to each other. Copy and paste works!

An example of one of the flowcharts I’ve been making, for how to cite journal articles in APA: